“My story in theology”

Published as “A Passion for Faith”, in Theology in the Making: biography, contexts, methods, ed. G. A. Thiessen & D. Marmion, Veritas, Dublin, 2005, 84-92.

If I ask myself when and where a passion for theology first awoke in me, the answer is clear: in the early sixties, in Caen (a Norman city in the north of France). I had finished a degree in Dublin in English and French literature and was awarded a French government grant for a year in Caen. There in 1961, just as the whole Catholic Church was preparing for the melting pot of Vatican II, the religion of my upbringing was exposed to the very different world of France.

I had grown up in a small village called Collooney in Co. Sligo, had been sent at the age of twelve to a Jesuit boarding school (Clongowes), which was followed by three years at University College Dublin. The disturbance of moving between those three Irish worlds was nothing in comparison with the impact of France. Religiously I remained pious throughout childhood and adolescence. During my time at university in Dublin I stayed at an Opus Dei hostel, which healthily challenged me to think about faith. I went to Mass frequently, if not quite every day. I also learned there that there was such a thing as theology and browsed in some books that were available. I developed an interest in Scripture, both as food for prayer and as a literary text. The Republic of Ireland in those years was a largely unified and Catholic society. Was it so tight and narrow, as we tend to portray it in hindsight? I didn’t experience it that way. Passive and sheltered, perhaps, but not painfully oppressive.

France, however, was something else. At Caen University I encountered a dramatic diversity of views and lifestyles. Even though I was studying in the arts faculty, most of my new French friends were students of science. I met atheists and unchurched Catholics for the first time in large numbers. But an even greater surprise came from meeting young French believers: they were passionately alive in their faith and introduced me to a dynamic Catholic chaplaincy. There were Bible evenings, meditation schools in local monasteries, social awareness events, and visits from famous thinkers, including Gabriel Marcel and a Dominican who was either Chenu or Congar (I don’t remember exactly). Even in a provincial town like Caen, we experienced something of the rich ferment of French Catholicism that was to have such an impact on Vatican II.

Encounter with complexities

It was the mixture of the two worlds that awoke me. On the one hand this new face of Catholicism, thinking, committed, and energetically communitarian. On the other hand my interaction with contemporaries who had little or no time for Christianity or Church. I realised that in fact my Irish upbringing had given me precious roots that I began to appreciate more in this new context. France was giving my faith new intellectual energy and these unbelieving friends were challenging me to spell out the gospel in another language (in every sense). Late into the night I discussed questions of meaning both with believers and unbelievers. I discovered that I had a gift, especially with unbelieving friends, to change the wavelength from argument to honest and personal exploration. In short I discovered the passion of my life, and which was to focus and develop slowly in years ahead – a passion to make sense of God for people today. Rather like Monsieur Jourdain’s speaking “prose”, without knowing it I was on the road towards “fundamental theology.”

The year after my Caen experience I entered the Jesuits. The idea had been there before even at the end of secondary school. If I had joined then, it would have been in a rather world-despising spirit. But now, after France, I entered with new horizons and an intuitive sense of a mission of making faith real in a world of unbelief, a world for which I now had much more feeling and sympathy. After two years of noviceship, I went to Oxford for special studies in Renaissance literature, doing a thesis on rhetoric in the poetry of George Herbert. I still regard him as one of the great spiritual poets in English, much more real than the more exhibitionist John Donne or the pomp of Milton. At Oxford there were different unbelievers, less anguished than the French and somewhat puzzled by my religious commitment (in those days even non-ordained Jesuits went around in Roman collars). When we had seminars on the religious poetry of the seventeenth century, I realised that the contours of inner experience, captured so marvellously in Herbert, spoke to everyone. A more explicitly religious vocabulary seemed to alienate, due no doubt to childhood memories of church. At this stage I knew little of professional theology but my natural preference was for the symbolic realm as a starting point. Hence by the time I came to study theology, I was shaped by several years of immersion in literature. If France gave me a field of pastoral passion, literature gave me a sensibility that was to prove a criterion of relevance. Merely abstract or doctrinal approaches seemed to ignore the battlefield of today’s lived sensibility. Theology, if it were going to be fruitful, would have to speak to people imaginatively. Are we not told in two of the gospels that Jesus never spoke the crowds except in parables?

Before I arrived at theology studies, another stage of formation gave me more trust in these shy intuitions. I taught literature for a year at University College Dublin and then had a year as a research fellow in Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. The year in the old Earlsfort Terrace location was exciting but its main blessing was the chance to meet and listen to a new generation of Irish students. Among them were some who have since become famous as writers or film makers, and whom I got to know well: Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan were there that year. Later there were many other future writers who studied English at UCD. In 1967 such contact was like living in the future. I remember saying at a large Jesuit gathering that the culture was shifting and that faith could no longer be taken for granted. Shock. Horror. What was this young Jesuit (of 28) saying? I escaped to America! It was a year of racial riots and Vietnam-related violence, even outside the door of our house. I don’t think I was able to integrate this social dimension into my rather personal view of faith. Not yet. That would happen later, as I will explain. In Johns Hopkins I ran into the early wave of postmodern thinking in literature, with people like Girard, Derrida and Hillis Miller. I did not understand it at the time but it shook my Oxford assumptions. If literature was no longer a serene field grounded in historical and humanist assumptions, would this not apply to theology as well? Baltimore also nourished my feeling for the world of non-belief, especially through friendship with some agnostic students of Jewish background. The common ground remained the world of poetry or imagination, which protected us from fruitless head trips.

From literature into theology

With this perhaps unusual background I came to the study of theology in the Milltown Institute in 1969. Looking back now I find it hard to evaluate those three years. Although some of the courses were stimulating and some of the teachers inspiring, much of the material came across as very churchy to me. To use the famous distinction of Pope John XXIII (borrowed in fact from Cardinal Suenens), the focus was almost exclusively ad intra, and all my experience had given me an ad extra orientation. I recognise that foundations had to be laid, that first-cycle theology needed to initiate us into the great tradition, and that hence the classical approach could not be jettisoned. But my passion for the contemporary struggles of faith would have been better served by another pedagogy. There remained a gap between the official study of theology and religious realities as I perceived them.

In an unusual step I was asked to continue lecturing in literature in the university, on a part-time basis in the afternoons or evenings, right through these years of basic theology. Some of the Milltown professors viewed this with understandable suspicion. For me it offered a double challenge: on the one hand to perform well in the theology examinations and on the other hand to continue to observe the impact of an increasingly secular environment. If I ask what remained with me from those first three years of theology, the answer seems clear. I benefited greatly from being able to research and write essays in various fields. From my literary studies I had acquired a certain pleasure and facility in writing, and the gathering of insights on paper allowed me to appropriate theology more than any other approach. Even today I remember what I wrote on themes such as the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the parallels between secular and scriptural literary criticism, or the difference between conscience and the superego, or the role of the Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel. That last topic proved strangely relevant when in 1994 I was sent in a Vatican delegation to have dialogue with a wise and spiritual ayatollah in Iran!

Immediately after that first degree in theology and priestly ordination I returned to a full-time lecturership in modern English literature in University College Dublin, and remained in that post for eighteen years (apart from some sabbatical periods). In the mid-seventies my superiors insisted that I should undertake a doctorate in theology. I had already begun to publish some articles on unbelief among the younger generation in Ireland. It seemed a good idea to explore atheism more theologically and this is what I did with a thesis entitled “Approaches to Unbelief” which I finished in 1979 for Queen’s University Belfast. The faculty there was very accommodating about non-residence and I had as my supervisor the kindly Dr James Haire, a leading Presbyterian scholar who had studied under Karl Barth. I was given great freedom and ended up with a broad-ranging thesis of a comparative kind, which involved a year of travel and field work. I examined different models of response to atheism. These included the transformation of official church attitudes during the debates at Vatican II, the “theology of atheism” developed by Karl Rahner (whom I met as part of my research), the work of the World Council of Churches in this field, and the theology behind the pastoral initiatives concerning unbelievers in France and French-speaking Canada. In a final section I compared these paradigms of theology with the portrayal of atheism in imaginative literature, taking as my key example the novels of Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White, who was a kind of contemporary Dostoevsky. It was not the tightest or most academic of theses but it gave me great satisfaction to gather that convergence together. In fact I was the first ever Roman Catholic to receive a doctorate in theology from Queen’s.

The Vatican and the Gregorian

Little did I know where all this would lead. It opened the door to some major and unforeseen changes in my life. Right through the eighties, while continuing my university work in literature, I began to reflect much more explicitly on the changing faith situation in Ireland and to publish articles and books in this area. My first book, Help my Unbelief (1983) became a mini best-seller due to a last-minute invitation to appear on Ireland’s most popular television pragramme, the “Late Late Show” – because an intended celebrity had got sick. In this and in other writings, I never felt called to highly specialist work. Instead I chose, rightly or wrongly, to serve a “middle-brow” or popular market. I looked on myself as a convergence thinker, asked to communicate between worlds.

Out of this increasing commitment to writing a second and utterly unexpected turning point happened. My books came to the knowledge of some officials in the Vatican and I was sent for! Not, as happens to some people, to be ticked off. Instead I was asked to serve for five years in the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers, which then merged into the Pontifical Council for Culture. The transition to Rome was not easy for me. I was used to a secular university and now found myself in a civil service, with some research functions. Nevertheless the five years were personally fruitful in that they opened new theological horizons, especially concerning culture. It was also an education in the diversity of faith contexts, since the work entailed visits to very different situations – from Ethiopia to Australia, from Slovakia to Iran. After the “quinquennium” ended, my Jesuit provincial decided to risk dividing my life between Rome and Ireland, an arrangement that lasted another five years. In Rome I taught fundamental theology for one semester a year at the Gregorian University, being thus drawn more than before into academic theology. In Ireland I was more free-lance, with some teaching commitments at Milltown and Maynooth, and a certain freedom to write and research. In those years I published my most academic theological book, or at least the one with most footnotes: Clashing Symbols: an introduction to faith and culture. Since the year 2000 I have been full-time at the Gregorian, involved mainly in the “second cycle” or postgraduate programme at licentiate level. My teaching regularly involves courses on unbelief and culture and I also teach more specialist seminars on Newman, Lonergan, the relationship between theology and imagination, and the history of thinking on the act of faith. It is personally most rewarding to teach students from all over the world, many of whom are going back to their own contexts to teach theology in seminaries and catechetical centres.

Contexts and roads not travelled

A one-paragraph digression concerning contexts. It sounds Marxist to say that context conditions consciousness. In 1986-7 I spent a year in Latin America, with the intention of returning there in a few years to teach theology in Paraguay and to help with religious formation there. That year had a major impact on my approach to theology. It showed me that many of my assumptions had been too individualistic. Living with the poor, I saw that unbelief (my constant concern) was more likely a product of a life-style than of a set of ideas. The deepening European secularisation seemed less spiritual and more social. Metz was right: it is what happens when the wellsprings of compassion are blocked or locked into the private realm. On my return to Dublin I lived for three years in a flat in Ballymun (then a socially troubled area), commuting each day by bus to UCD. The clash of contexts was fruitful. It opened new horizons for my attempts to theologise. However the hope to go to Paraguay never materialised. I was called to the Vatican instead, and I am still in Rome. I don’t regret the might-have-been of Latin America, but I do know that it would have pushed me to think along different lines. Teaching in the Gregorian is an excitingly international experience but its model of theology can suffer from dearth of real context. Both faculty and students are richly multicultural but with the risk of lacking roots in any one culture.

At present I am trying to write a book called Translating the Giants. The hope is to draw on some of the great figures of theology who have pondered the question of faith, ranging from Aquinas to Newman, and from Tillich to Pierangelo Sequeri (my favourite Italian theologian of today). The emphasis, however, will be on translating, in the sense of making their wisdom available for a non-specialist readership. With my background, as recounted here, that seems to be my calling in theology. Comparing myself with some of my colleagues in the Gregorian, I am not a “real theologian”. I don’t have it in my blood for decades. There are so many areas in which I would fail a first-year examination. Instead, the convergence of my life asks me to stand at various crossroads or frontiers and to reflect on what I find there. In the past I used blame myself for not being more academically focussed, but then, according to a Buddhist saying, human unhappiness comes from trying to live more than one life at a time.